No different that Bill Gates, that college dropout that was in the right place at the right time, had an ostensible competitor that didn't fit the system correctly, and managed to provide something close enough to what was wanted and needed to cement his place in the market.
For all we know, in social networking, this could really be the Killer App. We won't know until we see how it's used.
I don't personally think that it is, but I'm also not a user of modern social networking either.
I don't see how your two posts are the same thing.
Market bubbles happen when something takes on an unreasonable value and continues to grow, people see that it grows and jump on, causing further growth, until there aren't enough new entrants to sustain the expected and required growth. Sometimes the subject of the transaction is something of actual value (property, raw materials), other times it's something of only representative value (Flowers, dotcom companies). A few investors can help the bubble grow, but they certainly aren't the cause. If anyone can be blamed, it's those who sensationalize and provide positive news coverage to bubbles, causing more people to join who might not have done so otherwise.
I saw signs of the housing bubble in 2002 when houses that I felt weren't worthy started crossing the $150,000 mark in this market. When we got married in 2007 we chose not to buy another house, thank goodness. We instead did so in 2010-2011 after the market crashed and got a short-sale for about half of what was owed on it. Our only real lament is not selling the old house when prices seemed ridiculous and renting for a couple of years. We could have tripled our square footage and had no loan if we had done so.
As for the dotcom bubble, that happened because a lot of people who didn't understand technology thought that those who claimed to had something of value, and thousands of companies that had no real product got money poured at them by greedy people who expected to be the next Bill Gates. Fast forward to now, and Zuckerberg is already a rich man, and his company is strong at the moment, so his acquisition isn't really the same thing.
If I were offered a BILLION dollars for something that I'd created, the first thing I'd do would be to hire a lawyer or firm capable of verifying the functionality of the agreement and letting them give any points as to things that could cheat me out of my money. That doesn't happen in a few minutes. "Yes" is a foregone conclusion for all but such a small number of otherwise reasonable transactions that it's essentially a certainty.
Only time will tell us the answer to that though, and possibly not even then. This will pivot on what Facebook does with its new company, and what happens to Facebook writ large in the marketplace and within the rest of the company.
Yeah, because I remember all of the relevant details of a programming language that I know is still in active use on lots of big iron computers and can more eloquently describe it than an article that might actually have been written by professionals, or at least enthusiasts.
My point is that there are languages that are mature that are capable of doing a lot of what people actually want to do already. If there are weaknesses in that language, a discussion on why replacing that language with another is helpful. As opposed to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In that sense, I like C++, even though I like C, because at least C++ chose to address some issues in C and improve upon them, rather than going, "I HATE C! I AM GOING TO WRITE A WHOLE NEW LANGUAGE!"
From wikipedia: "FORTRAN is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing."
Sounds to me like unless there's a particular weakness in FORTRAN that doesn't lend itself to workarounds or repair in newer versions of the language, there's already a numeric computation and scientific programming language that's well documented, mature, and widely distributed.
What's really annoying me now is that Dell is rebranding Lexmark printers. We've attempted to stop buying Lexmarks because of problems we had with at least four product lines a few years back, but it's hard to write the bid to say, "No Lexmark Guts". Dell won the bid and we're still having the same sorts of problems.
That's what came to my mind on gp's post. We are on our third AS400/i-Series, as we like the payroll for 10,000 employees to just always work, and the finance, purchasing, and inventory system for 200,000 tracked and probably 10,000,000 untracked assets to just work. We have probably quad-9 uptime reliability with the IBM, while our Microsoft boxes constantly have downtime.
The next main-trunk comment below this one explains it very well. IBM may not have their name on the product anymore, but they will undoubtedly still have a heavy hand in it, and the risk gets put off on the new owner.
IBM made mostly good stuff, though I still don't care for their Lexmark printers nowadays. Otherwise, they could do well if they're shilling whatever hardware they need to push, not just their own.
No, but an inside man could. Which was a featured part of 1984 and the film Stalag 17. Those who interrogate would have to place detainees in close proximity to agents, subject both (or give the appearance) to uncomfortable experiences, and let trust develop, so the agent can get information. Not easy, not quick, not cheap, but might possibly be effective.
There are a lot more K cars still on the roads here than there are GM X-cars or Ford CE14 models...
Kinda wish I had gotten the LeBaron, the '93 Thunderbird that I did end up buying blew a head gasket a couple years later, in spectacular fashion, and likely cracked or warped the head, and I didn't know anything about repairing cars then. Nowadays I could fix that myself, but back then the repair would have cost more than the car was worth by far.
It was near 7th Avenue and Bell Road.
The trouble with the Insight was at Showcase Honda on Camelback. There were about twelve years separating the two incidents.
Wife's car was bought from the now-defunct Acura dealer that was in south Scottsdale on McDowell or Thomas, before we met. For awhile she had it serviced up at the north Scottsdale dealer, but then Acura of Tempe proved much closer and less busy, so there it goes when it needs something I don't feel like doing.
It was "Big Auto Mall" in the Phoenix area, catering to Honda and a couple of Korean makes. This was the used car side, which was even worse probably than the new car side would have been.
I will never buy a new Honda because of this experience plus another when I was curious about the interior on a modern Insight. On the other hand, my wife has an Integra, and it's always been serviced by the dealer for the big interval services. We've had very good experiences browsing the showroom at the Acura dealer, and we may well end up with a TSX wagon for our next ride because they've been good to us.
The differences between two sides of the same company are amazing.
I was interested in the used Chrysler LeBaron convertible that was for sale on the spinning pedestal on the corner of the building. I pulled in, got out, asked how much. When I was told how much I got back in the truck, and when I turned to leave I found my path blocked aways down by four salesmen at the driveway. So, I stopped, turned on 4wd, turned a little to the right, hopped the curb, drove through the landscaping and hedge row, and out on to the street.
I was eighteen and didn't think about that. I was shopping for my first car and had been four-wheeling in the Isuzu Trooper that my parents owned for the past two years and thought as an eighteen year old thinks, which translates roughly as "VROOM!"
This is common in all retail. Managers are under pressure from the people above, and many have their salaries tied in to sales from their store.
One of the best techniques I've found for getting rid of salespeople is to first ask them highly technical questions that I know they can't answer about their products, and if they still persist, I tell them to leave me alone while I shop or else I will leave the store without buying anything. That latter almost always works.
Only sales people that I've had trouble with past that generally are car salesmen, who've even tried the technique of blocking the exit driveway with staff so I couldn't drive off. I saw their block, and raised them a 4x4 through the hedge row. Shoulda seen the looks on their faces...
...but I only buy sale items. We bought an Epson 8350 video projector when it was $100 less than any other competitor that I could find, and have really liked it. But, again, I don't buy cell phones from them, and it's not common for me to buy computer parts from them anymore either. They probably can't survive as a big-box store when many customers are looking for a discount-boutique experience as far as the occasional big purchase is concerned.
You forgot a key third strategy- not posting one's dilemma and site to a popular geek news and discussion forum. At least this submitter was smart enough to not post his URL, so he hasn't gotten slashdotted...
Is there something inherently evil about software that one has to pay for, as a concept?
I don't deny, vendor lock-in is evil, but if one makes an effort to write a killer app, like a spreadsheet, or a database tool, or a graphics manipulation program, shouldn't one have the right to charge for that software? If other competing products come out, then the developer needs to adapt to produce better software.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but they at least make stuff. That is one difference between Microsoft and Patent Trolls.
Admittedly, I don't think a lot of what's patented in software should be able to be patented, but our Patent Office doesn't have the expertise or manpower to deny so many patents that they should deny.
Slashdot Mirror
No different that Bill Gates, that college dropout that was in the right place at the right time, had an ostensible competitor that didn't fit the system correctly, and managed to provide something close enough to what was wanted and needed to cement his place in the market.
For all we know, in social networking, this could really be the Killer App. We won't know until we see how it's used. I don't personally think that it is, but I'm also not a user of modern social networking either.
I don't see how your two posts are the same thing.
Market bubbles happen when something takes on an unreasonable value and continues to grow, people see that it grows and jump on, causing further growth, until there aren't enough new entrants to sustain the expected and required growth. Sometimes the subject of the transaction is something of actual value (property, raw materials), other times it's something of only representative value (Flowers, dotcom companies). A few investors can help the bubble grow, but they certainly aren't the cause. If anyone can be blamed, it's those who sensationalize and provide positive news coverage to bubbles, causing more people to join who might not have done so otherwise.
I saw signs of the housing bubble in 2002 when houses that I felt weren't worthy started crossing the $150,000 mark in this market. When we got married in 2007 we chose not to buy another house, thank goodness. We instead did so in 2010-2011 after the market crashed and got a short-sale for about half of what was owed on it. Our only real lament is not selling the old house when prices seemed ridiculous and renting for a couple of years. We could have tripled our square footage and had no loan if we had done so.
As for the dotcom bubble, that happened because a lot of people who didn't understand technology thought that those who claimed to had something of value, and thousands of companies that had no real product got money poured at them by greedy people who expected to be the next Bill Gates. Fast forward to now, and Zuckerberg is already a rich man, and his company is strong at the moment, so his acquisition isn't really the same thing.
If I were offered a BILLION dollars for something that I'd created, the first thing I'd do would be to hire a lawyer or firm capable of verifying the functionality of the agreement and letting them give any points as to things that could cheat me out of my money. That doesn't happen in a few minutes. "Yes" is a foregone conclusion for all but such a small number of otherwise reasonable transactions that it's essentially a certainty.
Only time will tell us the answer to that though, and possibly not even then. This will pivot on what Facebook does with its new company, and what happens to Facebook writ large in the marketplace and within the rest of the company.
I think that most state governments still use it for their budgeting too. That's a lot of very important usage.
Yeah, because I remember all of the relevant details of a programming language that I know is still in active use on lots of big iron computers and can more eloquently describe it than an article that might actually have been written by professionals, or at least enthusiasts.
My point is that there are languages that are mature that are capable of doing a lot of what people actually want to do already. If there are weaknesses in that language, a discussion on why replacing that language with another is helpful. As opposed to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In that sense, I like C++, even though I like C, because at least C++ chose to address some issues in C and improve upon them, rather than going, "I HATE C! I AM GOING TO WRITE A WHOLE NEW LANGUAGE!"
From wikipedia: "FORTRAN is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing." Sounds to me like unless there's a particular weakness in FORTRAN that doesn't lend itself to workarounds or repair in newer versions of the language, there's already a numeric computation and scientific programming language that's well documented, mature, and widely distributed.
What's really annoying me now is that Dell is rebranding Lexmark printers. We've attempted to stop buying Lexmarks because of problems we had with at least four product lines a few years back, but it's hard to write the bid to say, "No Lexmark Guts". Dell won the bid and we're still having the same sorts of problems.
I donno, I can think of numerous films that have otherwise. Especially films starring Bruce Campbell...
That's what came to my mind on gp's post. We are on our third AS400/i-Series, as we like the payroll for 10,000 employees to just always work, and the finance, purchasing, and inventory system for 200,000 tracked and probably 10,000,000 untracked assets to just work. We have probably quad-9 uptime reliability with the IBM, while our Microsoft boxes constantly have downtime.
I'm sure some Slashdotters, particularly those of overly-zealous Apple or Microsoft bend, thought all IBM divisions were POS divisions...
The next main-trunk comment below this one explains it very well. IBM may not have their name on the product anymore, but they will undoubtedly still have a heavy hand in it, and the risk gets put off on the new owner.
IBM made mostly good stuff, though I still don't care for their Lexmark printers nowadays. Otherwise, they could do well if they're shilling whatever hardware they need to push, not just their own.
Yes, but what would the Americans do?
No, but an inside man could. Which was a featured part of 1984 and the film Stalag 17. Those who interrogate would have to place detainees in close proximity to agents, subject both (or give the appearance) to uncomfortable experiences, and let trust develop, so the agent can get information. Not easy, not quick, not cheap, but might possibly be effective.
There are a lot more K cars still on the roads here than there are GM X-cars or Ford CE14 models...
Kinda wish I had gotten the LeBaron, the '93 Thunderbird that I did end up buying blew a head gasket a couple years later, in spectacular fashion, and likely cracked or warped the head, and I didn't know anything about repairing cars then. Nowadays I could fix that myself, but back then the repair would have cost more than the car was worth by far.
It was near 7th Avenue and Bell Road. The trouble with the Insight was at Showcase Honda on Camelback. There were about twelve years separating the two incidents. Wife's car was bought from the now-defunct Acura dealer that was in south Scottsdale on McDowell or Thomas, before we met. For awhile she had it serviced up at the north Scottsdale dealer, but then Acura of Tempe proved much closer and less busy, so there it goes when it needs something I don't feel like doing.
It was "Big Auto Mall" in the Phoenix area, catering to Honda and a couple of Korean makes. This was the used car side, which was even worse probably than the new car side would have been. I will never buy a new Honda because of this experience plus another when I was curious about the interior on a modern Insight. On the other hand, my wife has an Integra, and it's always been serviced by the dealer for the big interval services. We've had very good experiences browsing the showroom at the Acura dealer, and we may well end up with a TSX wagon for our next ride because they've been good to us. The differences between two sides of the same company are amazing.
I was interested in the used Chrysler LeBaron convertible that was for sale on the spinning pedestal on the corner of the building. I pulled in, got out, asked how much. When I was told how much I got back in the truck, and when I turned to leave I found my path blocked aways down by four salesmen at the driveway. So, I stopped, turned on 4wd, turned a little to the right, hopped the curb, drove through the landscaping and hedge row, and out on to the street.
I was eighteen and didn't think about that. I was shopping for my first car and had been four-wheeling in the Isuzu Trooper that my parents owned for the past two years and thought as an eighteen year old thinks, which translates roughly as "VROOM!"
This is common in all retail. Managers are under pressure from the people above, and many have their salaries tied in to sales from their store.
One of the best techniques I've found for getting rid of salespeople is to first ask them highly technical questions that I know they can't answer about their products, and if they still persist, I tell them to leave me alone while I shop or else I will leave the store without buying anything. That latter almost always works.
Only sales people that I've had trouble with past that generally are car salesmen, who've even tried the technique of blocking the exit driveway with staff so I couldn't drive off. I saw their block, and raised them a 4x4 through the hedge row. Shoulda seen the looks on their faces...
...but I only buy sale items. We bought an Epson 8350 video projector when it was $100 less than any other competitor that I could find, and have really liked it. But, again, I don't buy cell phones from them, and it's not common for me to buy computer parts from them anymore either. They probably can't survive as a big-box store when many customers are looking for a discount-boutique experience as far as the occasional big purchase is concerned.
You forgot a key third strategy- not posting one's dilemma and site to a popular geek news and discussion forum. At least this submitter was smart enough to not post his URL, so he hasn't gotten slashdotted...
Is there something inherently evil about software that one has to pay for, as a concept? I don't deny, vendor lock-in is evil, but if one makes an effort to write a killer app, like a spreadsheet, or a database tool, or a graphics manipulation program, shouldn't one have the right to charge for that software? If other competing products come out, then the developer needs to adapt to produce better software.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but they at least make stuff. That is one difference between Microsoft and Patent Trolls.
Admittedly, I don't think a lot of what's patented in software should be able to be patented, but our Patent Office doesn't have the expertise or manpower to deny so many patents that they should deny.